In the Arabic language, there are diacritics [including the fat-ha, dhammah and kasrah] that can be the reason a word’s meaning changes completely. One of these diacritics is the shaddah. Insha Allah I will briefly explain what this is and move on to the Tajweed rule regarding the Noon and Meem letters that have a shaddah.

Directly translating the word shaddah, results in the meaning “[sign of] emphasis”. In general language, it means to pull or make something tight. But how does the shaddah actually function? It stresses a letter by doubling it’s sound. As given in a previous post [see “Al-Noon Al-Saakinah: rule four”], a shaddah consists of two letters [hence the doubling]:

The first letter is a saakin, i.e. it has sukoon on it

The second letter has a respective diacritic, fat-ha,dammah, or kasrah.

The example given in the previous post was:

fawaylun lillatheena

Here we noted that the first shaddah on the laam was there for notice purposes, and the second was there to be a shaddah and double that second laam. And so the word is read as:

lil-latheena as written above, lillatheena

See, two laam‘s.

Just to be sure it all makes sense, a few more examples of shaddah are as follow:

________________

kar-ratan fanatabar-ra‘a _______________ it-tabi‘u

karratan fanatabarra’a _______________ ittabi‘u

wal mutal-laqaatu yatarab-basna

wal mutallaqaatu yatarabbasna

bu‘ulatuhun-na ahaq-qu birad-dihin-na

bu‘ulatuhunna ahaqqu biraddihinna

To briefly explain the colour code. The light green is where the doubling of the letter occurs. The darker green is the respective diacritic that follows the doubling.

Now that the shaddah is down-pat understood, the Tajweed rule regarding the shaddah is as follows.

For every noon and meem mushaddad, i.e. for every noon and meem that have a shaddah, one must sound a ghunnah.

Recall a ghunnah is the sound made entirely by the nose [nasal passage]. It is almost like a hum and completes the sound of the noon or meem. Ghunnah is directly translated to “nasalisation” and this should not be longer than two counts. i.e. similar to the time it takes to say the words: “one – two”

This rule in Arabic is called, ghunnat noon/meem mushaddadah.

It is the simplest rule, because you just need to check, does the noon/meem have a shaddah on top? If so, sound a ghunnah.

Examples for ghunnat noon mushadadah are:

____________________

Examples of ghunnat meem mushaddadah are:

____________________

And it’s as simple as that! This Tajweed rule is complete! Where you see a shaddah on a meem or noon, just do a ghunnah.

But wait.

As I mentioned, diacritics have the ability to change the entire meaning of a word/sentence. I don’t like to just say things, so let’s prove it.

Let’s look at the word:

دَرَسَ

darasa

Darasa means “he studied”. Now let’s add a shaddah to this word:

دَرَّسَ

dar-rasa

Darrasa means “he taught”. Very simple, very big difference. One more example.

The sentence:

بَكى صَبِيٌّ

bakaa sabiy-yun

This sentence means “a boy cried”.

Adding another two shaddah causes two things, letters alif and laam to be added making the boy an object being pointed to, and the meaning to change.

Note:

بَكَّى الصَّبِيُّ

bak-kaa al-sabiy-yu

Which means “[he] made the boy cry”.

Later you will come to realise that not only do diacritics change the meaning of things, but so does the pronunciation of a letter.